Front Page

Rumours of Intel "pausing" MeeGo work - not true they say

A number of sites have picked up a news story quoting unnamed "industry sources" saying that Intel will temporarily halt work on MeeGo, to focus on OEMs requiring Android and Windows. CNET quote an unnamed "Intel spokerperson" saying they remain "committed" to MeeGo:

Intel plans to "temporarily discontinue development of its MeeGo OS due to a lack of enthusiasm for the platform from handset and tablet PC vendors." Instead, Intel will focus on hardware that is paired with either Android or Windows Phone in 2012, according to the report, citing industry sources.

"We remain committed to MeeGo and open source, and will continue to work with the community to help develop and meet the needs of customers and end users," an Intel spokesperson told CNET

Although denied by Intel, such a move would make some sense: MeeGo's brand has been tarnished by Nokia's change of strategy and the openness - touted as MeeGo's unique selling point over Android - has disappeared as Intel have withdrawn from public, and open development, into corridor- and watercooler-based discussions in Intel offices (along with private mailing lists and bugtrackers).

Although MeeGo still remains open source, its promise of open development processes and open governance has fallen apart.

Public Maemo Community meeting to be held on September 6th

A September Maemo community meeting has been scheduled for September 6, in #maemo-meeting, at 15:00 UTC. It appears this will be the last meeting before the next election. The tentative agenda for the meeting is: Election *operation* (so election runs smoothly and *not* to discuss issues that may be debated in the election); *Current* status of maemo.org

There is also a need for a trusted community memember (skilled in SQL) to learn the opertation of the election from Dave Neary for use in any future elections.

Applications

RC Flyers Toolkit Box

This toolkit, published by Oliver Fels,is an integrated suite of tools to enable RC pilots to keep track of their batteries and charging cycles as well as manage flights and check lists. Plus it includes a useful pinion calculator to calculate rotor head speed on R/C helicopters

The source, and binary packages for Harmattan and Fremantle, are available to download from their Sourceforge page. This means, of course, they aren't on track to go through the Maemo Extras Community QA process.

Development

Javier S. Pedro has continued his experiments to get the N950's FM receiver chipset working, and has succeeded:"RADIOOOOOOOOOOOO I AM HEARING RADIO FMRX RIGHT AT THIS MOMENT FROM MY N950!!! [...] Yesterday I miraculously suddenly started getting FM sound -- via the digital audio path. After a few more tries I am now able to get it to work consistently. Success!

That day I had been playing with libresource as part of my experiments with SDL, and I realized that's the only thing that was different from other experiments. And indeed, the key is in ohm-plugins-misc. Within it is the magic opcode that was missing from my initial post and that correctly configures the digital output.

Further details on how the resource management system needs to be configured, and discussion about the possible architecture of an FM radio application continue in the thread.

Proposed patch to add colour theme support to Qt Components

One of your editors (Andrew Olmsted) noticed that the meegotouch colour schemes available in Harmattan cannot be easily used in QML despite QML's reliance on meegotouch theme images for Qt Component styling.In the grand tradition of Open Source software I decided instead of complaining about this I would do something about it. So over the weekend I wrote a patch to Qt Components that will allow users to use any of the 19 (yes, nineteen) built in colour themes as simple as: Component.onCompleted: theme.color = 15I am hoping to get some attention for the bug report and merge request to see if they can be integrated into the Harmattan release at some point so all developers can use this method.

Community

Nokia N9 hackathon in Vienna next month

Thomas Perl talks about the fact thatNokia Austria is organizing a N9 Hackathon around the N9 on the second weekend of October (2011-10-08 + 2011-10-09) in Vienna. If you live in or around Austria, or wanted to have an excuse for coming to this nice place from abroad for some serious coding, this might be a good opportunity to meet some fellow Maemo/MeeGo community members and get some hacking done. We plan to have some hardware like NFC tags to develop cool stuff with the N9's hardware, so don't forget to bring your creativity as well as skills ;)

Food, drink and (limited) accomodation will be provided; so this looks like an excellent event for those who can get to Austria easily.

Devices

MeeGo developer devices

martin brook has published a wiki page listing allof the various devices owned by developers. MeeGo builds have been attempted and gotten to various stages the devices which can be used for MeeGo development.

Announcements

Virtual MIDI Piano Keyboard for Harmattan

Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas announces Virtual MIDI Piano Keyboard (VMPK) for Harmattan ported from Symbian. Pedro notes some advantages of having a real Linux base:When I was doing some research for the Symbian port, I've discovered that creating sound always used very large audio buffers, no matter the method, producing about one second of latency or more. This is unacceptable for a musical instrument emulation, so network MIDI was the only available option. On the other hand, the Nokia N9xx uses Linux, including ALSA and PulseAudio among other usual infrastructure, so the latency is not a problem and FluidSynth is a perfectly sound complementary addition to VMPK.The package can be downloaded from the SourceForge project homepage, and Pedro would appreciate any feedback from users.

Orientation game for Harmattan

Thomas Perl has put together an orientation game for Harmattan which requires a player to move the device to the orientation indicated on screen within a certain amount of time. This can require some interesting contortions when played one-handed.Woo. One of these games where you rotate your device under time pressure.The .deb is available from Thomas's site.